The Place Picker Widget and Autocomplete component are two powerful features part of Google Play Services. Here we take a look at both of these componenets and how we can implement them in our applications. As of Play Services 7.0, Google have made some great features available for us to implement into our apps –… Continue reading
Approaching Android with MVVM
Building an MVVM architectured application using the Data Binding Library The Data Binding library for android is something that I’ve been keen to check out for a short while. I decided to experiment with it using the Model-View-ViewModel architectural approach. To do this, I took a HackerNews Reader app that @matto1990 and I worked on together,… Continue reading
Exploring Chrome Customs Tabs on Android
Alongside Android Marshmallow, we saw the announcement of the Custom Tabs library for Android. Let’s take a look at what this new library does and how we can use it to provide an improved User Experience when web content is displayed within our applications. Google recently announced the release of a new support library, known… Continue reading
Exploring Google Eddystone with the Proximity Beacon API
Google recently announced the release of their cross-platform BLE Beacon format. Here we look at what we can do with it and how to use this new API to manage our beacons. We recently saw the announcement of Google’s open beacon format, known as Eddystone. Released alongside this was the Proximity Beacon API, used to register… Continue reading
Exploring the new Android Permissions Model
The approach to permissions for both users and developers is changing with Android M. Here we take a look at how they’ve changed, how this affects the user experience and what we need to do to implement this new model. Following the new Android announcements at Google I/O 2015, we previously took a look at the… Continue reading
Exploring the new Android Design Support Library
This new library introduces several new components previously not available out-of-the-box. Here we take a brief look at what they are, what they do and how we can implement them. I’m a massive fan of material design. Everything about it provides a strong feeling of consistency between applications and as a whole makes them both… Continue reading